


Maybe it was real

by basaltgrrl



Category: Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-22 17:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2516513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex wakes up in 2007 after her experiences in the '80s.  She and Maya Roy have something in common, however much they might try to fight it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [talkingtothesky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/talkingtothesky/gifts).



It starts with an email.

It's waiting for Maya when she comes back to her desk after hours in court, the lights of the city spangling the windows and the office hushed. The name at the top of her queue seems entirely unfamiliar for a moment until she puts two and two together, and then a strange feeling churns in the pit of her stomach and she pauses for a moment before clicking the name on her screen.

Alex Drake.

"We need to talk," blares the subject line.

We don't need to do anything, Maya thinks viciously, almost turning away without reading it, hoping for an interruption, a phone call, anything. She could delete it. But she knew she wouldn't, knew she hadn't let go any more than Sam's mum had. It had been a hellish few months, following upon the previous agonizing period of not knowing whether Sam would wake from his coma, and she honestly feels a dull and hard-won sense of accomplishment just for the fact that she still shows up for work each day. 

She still meets with Ruth Tyler every week or so, for coffee. Ruth seems to have perfected the skill of not talking about Sam for all that she still wants to see his friends. Maya has not done so well, even though she's managed to explain to people that she and Sam had stopped dating even before his car accident, even before his long stay in hospital. The thing is, she'd felt compelled to explain, to justify not being at his bedside. It was a thing she still feels the most unimaginable pang of guilt about, two months out.

She moves the mouse away from the delete button and clicks the email.

"I don't understand why you won't believe me."

No you bloody well don't, she thinks. She'd listened to the tapes Sam had made. She knew about the supposed time travel. She'd had a few abortive conversations with him, after he'd woke up. How sodding different he'd been.

"I can tell you things about Sam."

Maya shakes her head, although no one is there to see her. She pushes away from her desk and leans back in her chair, burying her face in her hands for a long, self-indulgent moment, wishing for a drink, a moment of companionship, or a long, hard run to clear the ache from her head. The ache from her heart. How could Alex tell her anything she didn't already know?

She leans back in. Her lips compressed into a tight line, she deletes the email, then picks up her mobile and dials.

"Drake."

"Stop it," Maya says without preamble. "I don't want to think about Sam any more. Just stop it."

"I know where Sam was," Alex says over the phone, her voice husky and intimate and invasive all at once. "Or at least, I know it was in some sense real. I know how this sounds, DI Roy, but you need to listen to me. That leap off the roof--"

"No! I will not bloody listen to any more of this!" She's hissing when she ought to be yelling, but it seems like the sort of conversation she should keep to herself, even when she thinks she's the only one in the office. "I didn't call you to hear it, Alex! Stop the emails, stop the calls or I will have to turn you in--"

 _Turn you in to your kind. Haven't they already talked you through this?_ Maya closes her eyes against Alex's voice, still urgent and husky in her ear, and wonders why she hasn't ended the call. And yet somehow she already knows why; she knows all too well how torn she herself is about Sam and everything that happened to him, how much she wanted him to be well and how much she had wanted him to just--pass away painlessly, end the travesty of caring for a body that's already gone... And how hard it was when he returned but there still seemed to be something missing.

"Maya," Alex's voice is a throb in her ear. "I need you to hear me."

And that makes her think that there are things she could tell Alex; things about Sam, about how broken he was. About how much Alex needs to just let go. And maybe going over it for another person will help Maya feel her way through the morass, find her way to a life without Sam or thoughts of Sam.

"All right," she says softly. "Let's meet tomorrow."

Drake makes a little noise, a hitch in her breath. "You mean it?"

"Yes. The Feathers? You know it?" The place is usually full of coppers and maybe they'd be better off hiding this little assignation, but on the other hand it might make it feel more natural, less weird. Maya's already half-regretting the offer.

"5:30? Or later?"

"I can be there. We're just having a little talk, Alex. OK? A drink and a talk, and no more emails. All right?"

"Fine, then." Alex's voice is lush. Satisfied. Only after they're off the phone does Maya wonder what she's done.


	2. Chapter 2

Maya walks in to the Feathers at 5:48. It's a bit old-fashioned--dark wood and plush fabrics, no neon, no stainless steel. She imagines it's a bit like the place Sam kept talking about, the Railway Arms, with none of the modern sheen, all of the patina. It's not her sort of place, if she's honest, although she's been here before with other detectives. 

There's the beginning of a crowd, business people drifting in, suits, a few tourists. She spots Alex at a table for two. Alex has a bottle of wine and two glasses, and she's just pouring for herself. She looks tired, dark circles under her eyes, but she also has an overblown quality, heavy eyeliner and a dramatic lipstick, as if it's a special occasion. There's something so changed about her. It's not as if Maya knew her well--or even at all, previously, brief encounters via Sam and then the odd experience of checking up on a comatose Alex Drake because it seemed so peculiar that she would mirror Sam in that way. Still. Alex is different, more direct, but with more of a facade.

"Hello," Maya says, and sits across from her.

"Oh," Alex puts down her glass, holds out a hand. They shake. "Would you like...?"

"Sure." What Maya really wants is a vodka martini, but it feels right to accept the hospitality. She sips the wine after Alex pours; a full-bodied red. "This is good."

Alex sighs. "I think my palate is shot, all that cheap chianti. Still, I know what to pick."

"Cheap chianti in your IV line, you mean?"

Alex cocks her head, brow wrinkled. "Don't joke like that; you know where I--what I'm referring to."

"That you spent those months not in a bed at the Royal Hospital, but in 1980's London with DCI Gene Hunt, swilling wine and catching criminals." Maya's not going to pussyfoot around the issue if Alex isn't. It's what she came here for, after all; confrontation, closure. Then why does she feel slightly guilty at the pang that crosses Alex's face?

"You don't believe me in the slightest, do you?"

"Well..." Maya coughs, discomfited. "Why should I? Sam's case is pretty clear; he had an accident, they discovered a tumor, they fixed him but he still had brain damage, and..." She stops. "And you. You got shot, you were in a coma and hallucinated. You imagined the man Sam told you about because that was on your mind. End of story." She takes a bigger gulp of wine. 

"But people have out-of-body experiences. They come back knowing things they didn't before. There is actual documentation of that sort of thing."

"Not in my world."

"So. Are you not willing to grant that there might be a reality beyond what we experience here?"

"I don't know. What evidence can you give me?"

Alex sighs, runs hands through her hair (an edgy bob, suits her intense eye makeup). "Your mum. She passed in the early '80s, didn't she?"

Maya folds her arms.

"She wanted to see you, but you wouldn't come to hospital with your dad. I held her hand for a few hours."

Maya closes her eyes, turns her face away, striving for calm. "Why would you make up something--"

"I was already fascinated by you, you see. Because of Sam, and because you were so--trying to do the right thing, but it wasn't fair to you. You didn't ask for that, and you were always just trying to do your best. Why did you transfer to London?"

Taken by surprise by the question, Maya blurts out the truth, "To get away."

"From what?"

"From expectations! From the looks! Half the time I felt like they all thought I drove Sam to jump, the rest of the time I felt like they thought I should be in deep mourning, and I... god, Alex, this sounds horrible, but we weren't that way anymore. Hadn't been like that for a long time. Sam was married to his work, and so concerned about appearances." She pauses to drain her glass, and draws a breath while Alex refills it, trying for calm. 

"Sam was trapped by his circumstances," Alex says softly. "And then he was trapped again, but it was the kind of life he needed more than he ever knew."

Maya can't help but scoff. "Life in a hospital bed? Oh, lovely."

"I think you have very defined ideas of what that means. I'm trying to tell you there's something more."

"You haven't offered me any proof; just something that you could have looked up."

Alex pours the last of the bottle into her own glass. Maya's surprised they've gone through it already, but she can feel the buzz, the pleasant warmth of wine and company, and she has to admit that this is not the experience she thought she'd have on this evening. There's a confrontational note to their barbs but also an acceptance.

"What about Sam?" she says suddenly. "You said you could tell me things."

Alex raises an eyebrow. "I thought you didn't believe me?"

"Just--tell me something. I don't care."

Alex smiles, lifts her wineglass to her lips. "I think he found his soul mate, in that place. Whatever it is."

Maya snorts again. "Who, that Annie?"

"No. Someone else, who was like his other half."

"What? You mean Hunt?"

"You know his story pretty well, for not believing in it."

Maya leans back in her chair and drinks her wine, stares off through the windows at the dark street beyond. Of course she knew Sam's 'story'. She'd had nothing else to think about, to puzzle over, while he withdrew, disappeared into himself. Nothing else to confront him with. And then he'd been gone, no longer confrontable, and she still had the puzzle in her hands.

"I thought," she said eventually, slowly, "that you had some kind of bond with that Hunt bloke."

"I did. Yes." Alex is sitting forward in her chair, elbows on the table, looking remarkably sober for all that the bottle is empty. "That doesn't preclude Sam from having something with him."

"So if Sam jumped off a roof to get back to him, why haven't you?"

The expression on Alex's face is... well, it's really a series of expressions, her entire story told in mute display if only Maya had the language to read it, but she watches those eyes downturned, those lips pursed, then thoughtful and wonders what kind of answer she might get.

"I think I'm more self-aware than Sam," Alex eventually says. "And I have a daughter."

A young man comes up to their table with a couple of menus. "Good evening. Will you ladies be eating with us tonight?"

Maya's not sure how to answer; she hadn't intended to spend that much time here, but she's already more pissed than she'd ever intended. Half a bottle of wine. She looks to Alex for guidance.

Alex sighs. "Let me just text my daughter. I think we'd both better eat and we're not nearly done here. Oh, and another bottle of the cab, please?"

Maya's about to remonstrate, but reconsiders. It's better to have this conversation with wine, really. There's still a part of her that thinks it's better not to have this conversation at all, but now with Alex just across the table from her, all hazy with wine and sharp with determination, she's in it wholeheartedly. What was it Sam used to say? God is in the detail? There's truth in that. She watches the tilt of Alex's head, the cant of her wrist, and puzzles again over the particulars. Alex seems both firmly rooted in her career and mystically adrift, much as Sam had been, and Maya realizes with a start that she's been feeling far more sympathy than she ever thought she would.


	3. Chapter 3

Alex orders a salad, the sort Sam would have made--fancy, with shaved prosciutto and dried figs. Maya opts for something a bit more filling to counteract the wine; a steak sandwich, with hearty mustard and mushy peas on the side. She puts her hand over her wine glass when Alex starts to tilt the bottle.

"I've had enough already," she protests.

"You're not going to make me drink this bottle by myself." It's not a question the way Alex says it, with a humorous quirk of her lips.

"No, but..."

"We'll be here a bit. You'll be fine."

"Okay then." Maya watches the dark liquid fill the bowl of the glass. It's funny that she is actually enjoying this time here with this woman. Like it's a date or something. Like they're mates. She hadn't intended to do more than have a brief, severe conversation about boundaries, about how very much Sam is gone and thus doesn't matter any more.

But the truth is, he does matter. She's still reacting to him even though she was there with Ruth Tyler when they identified his body, helped Ruth write an obituary and watched Ruth receive his remains post-cremation. Christ. She gulps wine like it's water, welcoming the haze, the lurking oblivion.

"What's wrong?" Alex is watching her, her voice warm and concerned but her eyes probing like the psychologist she is.

"I don't even know what I'm doing here." Maya punctuates it with another sip of wine.

"You think you're here for closure, but you're looking for something more."

"Bollocks. You think I'm searching. You're depending on it, aren't you, because you want answers you can't have, and the Princess of--of CID gets what she wants." Maya leans forward, making her point with a determined finger-wave in Alex's face. "I'm not here to fulfill your wishes, Drake."

Alex bursts out laughing.

Maya leans back, surprised and a little put out, and Alex continues chortling with a hand over her mouth as if that could stop the mirth. "Oh god," Alex blurts, "as if you could!"

"What the bloody hell is wrong with you?"

"I've been places I shouldn't have, and now I don't know where I'm supposed to be," Alex titters. "Just don't call me Bolly and we'll be fine."

"I can't think of anything I'm less likely to call you."

The server arrives with their plates, and the interruption gives Alex space to pull herself together. Maya feels warm and loose-limbed; the moment of frustration dissolved by laughter and wine, and she has another sip before tearing into her sandwich with unexpected hunger.

Alex is still smiling as she picks through her salad. She drinks with more appetite than she eats. The second bottle of wine is nearing the halfway point when Maya puts down the crust of her bread and wipes her lips on the napkin.

"So what is this supposed to accomplish?" she asks, gesturing around their table. 

"I just--I thought, you've been denying so ferociously. I thought you'd like that there's another interpretation of what happened to Sam."

"Rosy stories are all well and good, but I saw him dead."

"We're back to that, are we? Maybe life is more mysterious, DI Roy. It's not all facts and figures and statistics."

"I thought you people wanted psychology to be accepted as a science."

Alex smiles at her wine. Perhaps Maya appreciates it more because it's not aimed at her; it's an entirely private moment of humour, a softening of Alex's sharp, contrary edges. She knows herself well enough to admit she's charmed by it, by the way the corner of Alex's mouth quirks.

"You cannot be more skeptical than certain people I've worked with, so give over," Alex says, still looking down.

"People--coma people? Imaginary people?"

"I do wish you'd stop calling them that."

"You know there was no DCI Hunt in the Met in the '80s, don't you? Surely you looked it up."

A flash of her smoky eyes. "Other levels of reality, Maya. You'll also have found that there was no DI Alex Drake then, either. And yet..."

"So how am I bloody supposed to accept any of this? If there's no proof, no confirmation, no Sam except the one I know is dead..."

"I've wondered. Sam and I each had a near-death experience, and as a result we spent time in another place that was very familiar yet different. I've had--thought about doing an experiment."

Maya shakes her head. She glances around, couples eating dinner, groups sharing drinks, laughing, existing in the present. "This is real, Alex. You can't experiment with near-death in the hope of finding Sam." Her wine glass is empty. She stares at it, suddenly weary of this conversation, of the not-unexpected weirdness of Drake. 

"I'd like to have someone there to monitor me. You're the best candidate."

Maya snorts. "What insanity are you planning?"

"I thought a heavy dose of sedative. If there's any real danger it can be reversed, but with enough of a drug one can--"

"Fuck me! I'm not going to help you kill yourself!" Her exclamation is loud enough that a few people glance their way. She's just glad she hasn't seen anyone from work, and also that none of them have seen her here with Drake being chummy and tipsy and frustrated. That thought clears her head just a bit, and she slips off her chair and picks up her purse.

"What--don't leave!"

"Here." She pulls out a twenty pound note. "Oh, that's not enough, I've got more..."

Alex grabs her wrist as she's digging through her wallet. "Maya. Please. Look at me."

The contact is electric, warm and tense and full of life. Alex's eyes are large and liquid and so very real, so very expressive. Maya can feel the wobble in her knees, the awareness of too much wine and too much time alone, the endless ache of uncertainty and sadness. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "That's going too far. And I really do have to go. I've got a--" she struggles for an excuse, anything at all. "Early meeting."

"It's not late!"

"It is. Too, too late." Maya slips the strap of her purse over her shoulder without dropping it; a minor triumph.

To Drake's credit, she doesn't leap up or cause a scene. When Maya glances back just before pushing through the cut-glass doors Alex is still sitting still, staring at her in a deep, yearning, inarticulate manner that makes Maya's throat ache with every beat of her heart.


End file.
